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Washington and the Cuban Revolution: Ballad of a never-ending policy – the myth of the ‘Miami Lobby’

Passengers prepare to board a flight to Cuba from Fort Lauderdale."Ever-growing numbers, at or near majority levels, of
Cuban-Americans favour normal relations with Cuba and an end to economic and
travel sanctions. It is precisely the growing pressure from Cuban-Americans
that led the Obama administration to lift the travel restrictions on that (and
only that) section of the US population."

By Ike Nahem

June
15, 2012 – Links international Journal of
Socialist Renewal -- The essential continuity of US anti-Cuba policy under
the US President Barack Obama’s administration has been a source of mystery and
confusion to many who oppose US sanctions. Within the US academic, think-tank
and media meritocracies – who often go in and out of government office – many
are frustrated, even embarrassed, by Washington’s continued pariah status over
Cuba in Latin America and internationally, as registered in annual lopsided,
humiliating votes against the US policy in the United Nations General Assembly.

So why
does Washington’s economic and political war against Cuba – the longest
unchanged foreign policy in US history, entering its sixth decade – persist?
Why is Cuba such an outsize question in US politics? Why does Washington
continue a policy that is utterly isolated in world and regional forums,
holding up US diplomats and policymakers to derision and contempt? (The stated
reasons given – the supposed lack of “democracy” and “human rights” in Cuba –
reek with such misinformation, half-truths, obvious hypocrisy and arbitrary selectivity
that they cannot be taken seriously and must be dismissed out of hand. I will
comprehensively take up the question of democratic rights, human rights, civil
liberties and the Cuban Revolution in a future article.)

The
Obama Administration, consistent with the approach of the Bush Administration,
has made a political decision to subordinate foreign policy and national
interest-based decisions to domestic politics with respect to its Cuba policy.
There is a bipartisan group of members of Congress – Democrats and Republicans,
House and Senate – who represent Florida, a state where there are many swing
votes that deliver the electoral votes for any president. These individuals not
only deliver votes, but they deliver campaign finance and generally make a lot
of noise and that combination has persuaded the White House that reelection is
more of a priority than taking the heavy lifting to set the United States on
the path of -normalization with Cuba for now. -- Julia Sweig, director for Latin
American studies, US Council on Foreign Relations

The
most common explanation for these questions is expressed in the quotation by
Julia Sweig above Sweig is a scholar with the super-establishment Council on
Foreign Relations and is its director for Latin America studies. She is the
author of the excellent book, Inside the Cuban Revolution and is a very
informed observer and analyst of Cuban history and politics. She is
unquestionably a strong opponent of US sanctions against Cuba and in favour of
normalised diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana. Sweig and other
dissenters within establishment circles, as well as many elected officials
purportedly opposed to US policy, point to or at the Cuban-American population
and elected officials who form in Washington a so-called and supposedly
so-powerful, “Miami Lobby”. Some even go so far as to say US policy and
“national interest” is being held “hostage” by this “lobby”. Such nonsense
crosses over into virtual conspiracy theories.

This
argument and explanation turns political reality on its head. It has never been
true and, in today’s world, it has never been less credible. It is a myth and
an illusion that the Cuban-American community and Cuban-American office-holding
politicians are the driving, determining force behind US policies toward Cuba.
US foreign policy in general and Cuba policy in particular, is driven by the
interests of the US ruling capitalist class of bosses, bankers and bondholders.
It is primarily mediated through its two political parties and state
institutions and secondarily through its big-business media, think tanks and
academic minions. Cuban-American bourgeois politicians are part of that mix,
prominent, but far from decisive.

Washington
has never and does not now, need the aging representatives of the ex-ruling
powers of Cuba, or their descendants, to explain to them why they should oppose
the Cuban Revolution and the domestic and international policies of the
revolutionary socialist Cuban government. The actual political affect of the “Miami
Lobby” myth (which through endless repetition has become almost a mantra) is to take the political
focus off the US government and place it on the Cuban-American community and a
handful of Cuban-American elected officials. It puts the cart before the horse,
the caboose at the head of the train

Such
politicians of Cuban origin in the US Congress as Republican Party Florida
representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, Democratic Party New
Jersey senator Robert Menendez and Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio can
be useful as a cover or a foil for a US policy that is so unpopular.
Cuban-Americans can be blamed and chided by those opposed to the policy and
praised and defended by those in favour of the policy. But they do not make
the policy.

The
myth of the “Miami Lobby” cuts across building a broad protest movement and the
kind of effective action that can actually force a change in the policy. By
homogenising (or worse, demonising) the contradictory and increasingly polarised
Cuban-American community, the myth of the “Miami Lobby” has become an obstacle
to winning over more Cuban-Americans to oppose US sanctions.

The
fact is that for more than five decades now there has been a bipartisan policy
and a common goal of defeating and eradicating the Cuban Revolution. None of
this has ever been, or is it now, primarily motivated by the interests of the
Cuban-American exile community in Miami. The origins and continuity of
Washington’s hostility to the Cuban Revolution is home grown. It flows out of
the politics, policies and example of the Cuban Revolution – both inside
Cuba and in its resonance across the Americas and internationally in Africa,
Asia and the Middle East and even inside the advanced capitalist powers.

The impact
of the Cuban Revolution on US politics

Cuba
appears and is presented as a minor question in US politics and foreign policy.
This is all the more so since the end of the so-called “Cold War” and its
decades-long conflict and clash between Washington and Moscow. In those days
Washington’s lurid propaganda painted Cuba’s revolutionary government as a
“client” and “puppet” of the former Soviet Union. While this was always
consciously insulting and factually absurd, the alliance of Cuba with the
Soviet bloc was used to fabricate a Cuban “threat” to the US and its people
(October 2012 will be the 50th anniversary of the traumatic “Cuban missile crisis”,
which was used to convince many working people in the United States of the
“threat” from Cuba.

Independent
of the Soviet Union, the “Cuba question” -- that is the political dynamics and impact
of the Cuban Revolution -- has always had major weight and importance in US
politics and foreign policy, especially in the Americas. This remains the case
today even though Cuba is a small island of less than 12 million people and the
United States is a globe-straddling economic, financial, political and military
superpower, albeit in relative decline today on all these fronts.

The end
of the “Cold War” and the political disappearance of the Soviet Union and its
Eastern European allies more than 20 years ago has not seen any easing up of US
anti-Cuba policy. On the contrary, it has essentially deepened. The consensus
of the US ruling class and central policymakers remains that Washington’s
economic and political war against Cuba must continue in today’s post-Cold War.
That world reality has developed into a new era, if not historical epoch,
defined by the worst generalised economic and financial crisis of the world
capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While in
public US politicians mock, deride and denigrate Cuba, it is clear that both
ruling parties in Washington continue to see Cuba as a formidable political
force with significant moral and political authority, especially in the
Americas, but worldwide. There is virtual unanimity in both parties that the
revolutionary Cuban government needs to be confronted and defeated, not
reconciled with on the basis of respect for Cuban sovereignty. From
Washington’s point of view, the Cuban government promotes anti-imperialist (or,
as they falsely put it, “anti-American”) revolutionary action, has not
renounced the program of international socialist revolution and, short of that,
supports any policies and struggles that defend the interests of workers,
peasants and youth. Such a perspective clearly impacts negatively on the
economic interests of US capital and Washington’s political and “strategic”
prerogatives in defence of those interests.

Tactical
divisions over Cuba policy

It is
common on the “US left” to become politically disoriented and disarmed (and
safely in the hands of “lesser evil” liberals and Democrats) by the intense and
even brutal expressions of what are in actual substance are relatively minortactical policy differences
between the two imperialist parties and within the ruling class in the United
States. Cuba is a classic case in point.

Every
year in the United Nations there is a lopsided anti-Washington vote (in 2011 it
was 186 for and 2 against with 3 abstentions) on the “Necessity of Ending the
Economic, Commercial and Financial Embargo Imposed by the United States against
Cuba” that gets bare mention in the US corporate media. Across the Americas,
Washington’s anti-Cuba policies are routinely ridiculed and opposed in every hemispheric
and regional forum, including “summits” of the Organization of American States,
traditionally a servile tool of US policy and hemispheric domination.

Cuba’s
strong defence of its sovereignty, its revolutionary ideas and its practice of
international solidarity with oppressed and exploited humanity has given the
socialist island important political and moral authority and weight in world
politics – way out of proportion to its size, numbers, economic strength or
military firepower. This is a cause of great irritation and consternation for
US rulers and their acolytes of the “Miami Lobby”. But it is a great testament
to the power of ideas in the world. In truth there is no greater
power on Earth than when progressive and revolutionary ideas inspire and
grip millions and become a material political force.

How to
achieve the common goal of overturning the Cuban government in real political
time naturally leads to furious tactical differences within the US
government and within and between the Democratic and Republican parties, which
share and exercise power in the US capitalist state. This is inevitable given
how isolated and unpopular the US anti-Cuba policy is in the Americas, in the
world and even inside the United States. Manoeuvres, shifts and concessions
occur from one year to the next and from one White House incumbent to the next,
all reacting to the pressure of events. It’s all aimed at positioning
Washington off the defensive in order to more effectively disorient, undermine
and overwhelm the Cuban Revolution.

Obama
vs. Bush

President
Obama has made some shifts and even partial retreats from the anti-Cuba rules
enforced by previous president George W. Bush. These are objectively positive.
It’s good that some Cuban musicians, artists and scholars have been allowed
into the US at the invitation of universities and cultural institutions. It’s
good that Cuban-Americans are allowed to travel to their country of origin
without the previous insulting bureaucratic restrictions. It’s better than
before that rules for licences allowing limited travel to Cuba by other US
citizens have been loosened.

These
moves by the Obama administration are in no way a shift away from the basic US
policy of “regime change”, destroying the Cuban Revolution. They basically move
US rules back to the norms under the administration of the Democratic Party’s
Bill Clinton and the first period of the George W. Bush’s republican administration,
before they were tightened up with the triumphalist hubris that followed
the US invasion of Iraq. At that time Bush selected Otto Reich as his assistant
secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, along with other important
figures among the counter-revolutionary exile groupings such as Roger Noriega,
a former top staffer for ultra-right, notoriously racist North Carolina senator
Jesse Helms. Such were the personnel directing the hemispheric policies of
Bush’s administration.

But
this did not work out well for US policy and position in Latin America,
particularly after Washington’s (and Reich’s) fingerprints were found all over
the failed April 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela against the popular, elected
government of Hugo Chavez. Bush was forced to remove both Reich and then later
his successor Noriega and retreat from the hyper-arrogant rhetoric and
posturing toward Latin America that became politically costly to Washington.

What
Obama has done is shift away from the more bellicose language and Bush-style
bombast around Cuba by making minimal adjustments in policy around travel and
visa rules to try and undo the political damage of the Bush years.
Nevertheless, Obama has been quite strikingly unsuccessful in winning any
support for the US anti-Cuba position in the Americas, which remains completely
isolated, excepting the right-wing Stephen Harper government in Ottawa. Canada
still continues to be the largest source of tourism to Cuba and carries out
considerable commercial exchange with the island.)

Under
Obama, the US treasury and justice departments have stepped up harassments and
prosecutions of US or foreign businesses deemed to “violate” US “rules” and
sanctions against commercial and financial exchange and collaboration with
Cuba. Cuba’s National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon recently stated, in an
interview with French academic and journalist Salim Lamrani:

[T]he Obama administration has been
considerably more consistent in the imposition of fines and sanctions against
foreign companies who violate the framework of sanctions against Cuba, that
engage in business transactions with us… A number of banks have been fined
several millions of dollars, more than 100 million in one case, for conducting
dollar-based business transactions and for having opened dollars accounts with
Cuban companies.

On June
12, 2012 it was announced by the US Department of Justice that the Dutch Bank
ING agreed to a $619 million fine for violating the US Trading with the Enemy Actby moving US currency from trades
with Cuba (and also Iran) through US financial networks. According to the
online Guardian Express Newspaper, “The fine is considered to be the
largest ever in the history of the US financial system”. Since the Obama administration
took office in 2009 major European banks Credit Suisse, Barclays and Lloyds
have reached similar settlements with the US government over financial dealings
with Cuba.

The
Obama administration continues to support and promote State Department and CIA
overt and covert programs that aim to subvert and undermine the Cuban
government and which landed State Department agent Alan Gross in a Cuban
prison. (The idea that Gross’s conviction and incarceration is the impediment
to improved US-Cuban relations that Obama wants to pursue is a very bad joke.
Washington’s actions in dispatching agents like Gross – just one instance of a
large-scale policy ofunremitting economic and political war against
Cuba funded to the tune of many dozens of millions of dollars in openly
budgeted allocations, not counting resources used for covert programs –
represents the real impediment to improved and normalised relations.)

Obama’s
State Department continues to keep Cuba on its list of “nations supporting
terrorism”, a huge lie and vile slander. Obama continues to ignore Cuban
diplomatic initiatives for bilateral cooperation around issues such as drug
trafficking and hurricane response coordination. Obama continues to resist the
unanimous opinion of Latin American and Caribbean member states of the
Organization of American States to end the exclusion of Cuba. Obama continues
to dismiss and resist any attempts to negotiate mechanisms, including any
“exchanges” that would release the Cuban Five, four of whom are in their 14th
year of incarceration, while one, Rene Gonzalez, was released after serving his
full term, but is not being allowed to return home to Cuba.

Another
clear sign of the essential continuity in Obama’s anti-Cuba policy from the
Bush administration – and really all previous White Houses since President
Dwight Eisenhower – is in Obama’s appointment of Ricardo Zuniga as “director
for western hemispheric affairs” for the White House National Security Council.
Zuniga was formerly a key player in the US Interests Section [the de facto US
embassy] in Havana under Bush, organising the extreme provocations against Cuba
led by Interests Section chief James Cason.

Looking
at the balance sheet of Obama’s policies toward Cuba compared to that of George
W. Bush, recalls the classic line of Groucho Marx: “I’ve worked myself up to
nothing from a state of extreme poverty”.

Waves
and patterns of Cuban emigration to the US

There
have always been Cuban workers who have emigrated to, lived and worked in the
United States. However, the origin and formation of a mass Cuban-American
“community” began with the large-scale emigration after the triumph of the
Cuban Revolution in 1959. Like all genuine social revolutions, the Cuban
Revolution was marked by deep-going and irreversible class struggle and polarisation.
In the first period after the Cuban Revolution some 5% of the then Cuban
population of 6 million made its way to Florida and the US where it was
received with open arms and special privileges as “refugees from communism”
obviating regular immigration requirements.

The
first wave of exiles were overwhelmingly from the Cuban ruling classes, their
supporters, hangers on and enforcers in the military and police apparatuses, as
well as the extensive organised–crime networks – narcotics marketers, brothel
owners and pimps, casino magnates and so on – that flourished in the Batista
era. As the Cuban Revolution began to implement radical economic and social
policies that benefited peasants, agricultural and industrial workers, and the
impoverished majority in general, large layers of the relatively small Cuban
middle and professional classes followed the largest landowners, capitalists,
army officers, cops and gangsters into exile. While a small minority, it was
nevertheless hundreds of thousands of people. (One example of this pattern was
in the over 50% of the 6000 doctors in Cuba who left the country after the revolution.
These doctors overwhelmingly served the Cuban upper and middle classes. The
average Cuban rarely, if ever, saw a doctor their entire life. Life expectancy
was in the low 50s. Infant mortality was over 60 per 1000, among the world’s
highest. Today, Cuba graduates 10,000 new doctors every year; life expectancy
is approaching 80 and infant mortality is 4.5 per 1000, among the world’s
lowest.)

Additionally
it should be noted that these first waves of emigrant-exiles were
overwhelmingly caucasian; among the most far-reaching policies of the
revolutionary Cuban government was the smashing of Jim Crow-style segregation
laws and policies on the island. Cubans of African origin were among the
strongest and most-enthusiastic supporters and protagonists of the revolution,
which was echoed in the wide support for the Cuban Revolution among African Americans
in the United States.

Of
course there was no mechanical one-to one political correspondence in the class
polarisation that accompanied the Cuban Revolution. Not every middle-class
Cuban opposed the revolution and split to Miami; a good number were in support
or ambivalent but patriotic. (For an excellent portrayal of this early period
of the revolution from the vantage point of an alienated middle-class Cuban,
see the masterful, world-acclaimed Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment, directed
by Tomas Gutierrez Alea.) And there were a small number of workers, peasants
and Afro-Cubans who actively supported the counter-revolution. Nevertheless, it
is an indisputable fact that the large majority of the Cuban population at the
time and overwhelmingly so among working people, peasants, youth and black
Cubans, embraced the revolution as their own work and actively defended it.

Many
thousands of Cuban exiles were recruited by the US military and intelligence
apparatus for covert action against Cuba. Business and financial opportunities
were established for the Cuban ex-bourgeoisie in south Florida by their US
government and business benefactors. The US Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which
allowed for quick permanent residency and expedited citizenship for declared opponents
of the revolution. More than $1.3 billion, nearly $10 billion in current dollar
values, was allocated for direct financial assistance to exiles.

The
Mariel boatlift

Over
several months in 1980, a series of provocations against Cuba by the administration
of President James “Jimmy” Carter, working with the conservative Peruvian
military government, led to gatherings of up to 10,000 Cubans at the Peruvian embassy
in Havana wanting to leave the country. (Millions of Cubans also mobilised at
this time in support of the revolution.) The death of a Cuban police guard at
the Peruvian embassy led the Cuban government to declare a policy of allowing
all Cubans who wanted to leave the island to bypass existing legal processes.
Cuban-Americans were invited to come pick up their relatives at the Mariel harbour.
Some 125,000 additional Cubans arrived in the US during the so-called Mariel boatlift. (Today the Brazilian government and companies are working with Cuba
in a major industrial project to make Mariel a state-of-the-world port for
freight and trade which, when completed and operational, will be a major boost
for the Cuban economy.)

This
wave of exiles was of a much different social and class composition than the
first waves. They were more on the margins of Cuban society, unassimilated into
the working class, indifferent or hostile to the revolutionary process in Cuba.
Many had histories of petty criminal activity in areas with no operating space
or “market” in Cuba such as gambling, loan sharking, commercial sex and
narcotics trafficking. Most simply wanted to leave Cuba and go to the United
States to join relatives or friends and pursue perceived business
opportunities. They thought that the United States would be a far more fertile
arena and market for their social and business – and criminal – proclivities.
US propaganda accused the Cuban government at the time of emptying its prisons
and even mental hospitals and shoving “the dregs of Cuban society” onto boats
bound for the US. Cuban authorities vehemently denied this and demanded proof
of such deeds, which was never delivered, although the slander lived on. (For
Fidel Castro’s passionate explanation of the entire affair and response to US
slanders see, An Encounter with Fidel: An Interview with Gianni Mina,
Ocean Press, pages 61-67.)

The
“Special Period” wave

In the
1990s, under the severe economic conditions of what was called in Cuba the
“Special Period”, following the collapse of the governments of the Soviet Union
and Eastern European “socialist camp”, thousands more Cubans left the island
lured by the Cuban Adjustment Act and
the refusal of the US to implement agreements for legal, organised immigration.
The relative improvement of the Cuban economy in recent years and the ending of
travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans under Obama, combined with the onset of
economic depression and crisis in the US and Europe, has reduced the volume and
political volatility of Cuban emigration to the United States.

There
are higher proportions of Irish and Israeli emigrants to the United States than
Cubans and this without either the expedited privileges of the Cuban Adjustment Act or the accompanying
demonisation and propaganda attacking those countries from the US government
and big-business media. Given the economic catastrophes currently gripping
Greece, Spain, Portugal and other “eurozone” economies, millions of working
people have been displaced and forced to consider emigration. It would be
interesting to look at immigration statistics in those countries compared to
Cuba today. Many from Spain and Portugal are today even emigrating to
Latin America.

In any
case, what stands out is that the large majority of Cuban working people
continue to stand their ground in Cuba and to fight for their revolution despite
the Cuban Adjustment Act, despite unremitting
US threats, sanctions and a sense of siege and despite often grinding economic
conditions. Today these Cubans are debating and fighting to improve and change
what has to be changed.

Elian
Gonzalez

The
case of Elian Gonzalez in the 1990s was a political turning point that
highlighted the developing and roiling contradictions within the Cuban-American
community. It set in motion politically centrifugal tendencies.

Public
opinion in the US at the time overwhelmingly favoured the right of Elian’s
father to return to Cuba with his son. The right-wing counter-revolutionary
circus in Miami acted out by Elian’s distant relatives, manipulated by
right-wing Cuban-American organisations, was viewed as distasteful and
inhumane. Washington tried every lure and trick to keep Elian in this country
and – in what would have been a real propaganda coup – to entice his father to
“defect”. But eventually they had to face the reality that this was not going
to happen and that Cuban, Latin American and US public opinion was becoming
indignant. Father and son were finally let go. The issue had riveted US
politics for many months and was a real blow to the authority and political
standing of the counter-revolutionary exile organisations and personalities.

The
Cuban-American community today

More
than 1.5 million people whose family origins are in Cuba are now citizens of
the United States. Cuba’s current population is nearly 12 million people.
Cuban-Americans are 4-5% of the Spanish-speaking US Latino population of
more than 40 million people. (Accurate figures are hard to specify given the
large layers of undocumented working people who have migrated to enter a vast,
illegal “black market” in labour to work in the fields, factories and cities of
the United States when such jobs were relatively plentiful.) These Spanish-speaking
immigrants (or English, French or Creole-speaking migrants from the Caribbean,
or Portuguese-speakers from Brazil) seeking to work in the US come from every
country and nationality, but only those of Cuban origin, under the Cuban Adjustment Act, get a very fast
track to US citizenship and a legal existence to work and live.

Over
three-fourths of Cuban-Americans live in Florida, 1.2 million people according
to the 2010 US census. The next four states sees a large numbers drop to a
little over 80,000 in New Jersey and a little less than 80,000 in New York,
some 75,000 in California and 35,000 in Texas. Florida is the fourth most
populous US state with 18.8 million people; Cuban-Americans are less than 10%
of that total. Cuban-Americans are 30% of Florida’s Latino population.
African-Americans are around 16% of Florida’s population, figures that in most
counts include black immigrants from the Caribbean. The Haitian population of
south Florida is between 100-200,000 including many undocumented workers.
Cubans make up 32 per cent of eligible Latino voters, Puerto Ricans 28 per cent
and Mexicans 9 per cent.

It is
absurd to extrapolate out of the size of the Cuban-American electorate an
assertion that this “bloc” is decisive in “delivering” Florida’s
electoral votes to a future president who must therefore “pander” to “extreme
anti-Castro” positions. By manipulating statistics this could be said about any
group, grouping, religious denomination or sect. In a close race between
Republicans and Democrats, don’t the 3% of Florida’s Jews become “decisive”?
What about the 725,000 Puerto Ricans? Why aren’t the presidential campaigns
pandering to the “pro-Aristide” views of Florida’s large Haitian population,
who by a large majority support the former Haitian president who was ushered
out of country by the US military after a coup? (The anti-Aristide campaign was
directly led by the above-mentioned Roger Noriega.) The absurdity is further
underscored by the fact that Florida’s Jews, Puerto Ricans, Haitians and the
70% non-Cuban Latinos are more preponderantly Democratic in their voting
tendencies (if they bother, like a near majority of eligible voters in general,
to vote at all given the dismal choices) and are more opposed to US sanctions
against Cuba than Cuban-Americans, who are supposedly preponderantly Republican
and obsessively, knee-jerkedly “anti-Castro”.

The
truth is that, once given the legal right to do so, Cuban-Americans are defying
the threats and admonitions of the Ros-Lehtinens, the Diaz-Balarts, the
Menendezes and the Rubios, that is, the congressional faces of the “Miami Lobby”
and flocking to Cuba and reconnecting with their homeland and families. Flights
are packed and leave every day from Miami and weekly in a growing number of
cities. They also rush to buy tickets and fill concert halls to see popular
Cuban musicians like Los Van Van, who happen to identify with the Cuban
Revolution. (On April 27, 2012, a fire was set at the Airline Charters company,
one of the companies that arranges legal flights to Cuba.)

The
fact is that the political domination of the old ruling oligarchy and Cuban
ex-bourgeoisie that became ensconced in south Florida and some enclaves in
northern New Jersey is sputtering to the end of its era of sway. That
ex-bourgeoisie was set up and established comfortably in business and with a
cozy niche in US bourgeois politics over the broader Cuban-American
community and enjoyed a degree of immunity from US law by the US government

Very
important, if not decisive, in this dynamic is the broader development and
growth of the Latino population in the US that is not of Cuban origin and with
a very different history and relationship to the “Cuba question”. Over decades
there has been a growth and accumulated political weight in US society and
politics of this broader Latino community, with a mass component of undocumented
workers who were a needed source of cheap labour and high profits for US
capitalists. This broader Latino community comprises peoples of many national
origins: Mexicans, Central Americans, Haitians (also concentrated in Miami as
well as New York City), none of whom share the views toward Cuba, Fidel Castro
and the Cuban Revolution of the surviving first waves of immigrant-exiles from
the 1960s.

The
fact is that among many Latinos living and working in the United States there
exists a significant degree of pride and respect, if not solidarity and
affection, toward Cuba for standing up to the Yanquis with dignity, even
among those far from agreeing with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Marxist views.

In
fact, it can be said that the children and grandchildren of the first waves of
Cuban émigrés, who, in general, are hardly partisans of the Cuban Revolution,
are nevertheless more objective and curious about Cuba and more generally in favour
of normalised relations and an end to US sanctions. This generation of
Cuban-Americans has undoubtedly been shaped as much by its experiences as
Latinos in the US and by interaction in the workplace with other Latino workers
and other workers, black and caucasian, than by their status as second or third
generation exiles from Cuba and the Cuban Revolution with all that political
baggage.

The
ex-bourgeoisie of Cuba, although many have prospered in business and bourgeois
politics from their connections and status, is in no way integrated into the US
ruling class. The bulk of Cuban-Americans today are wage workers, professionals
and small business owners. Their political views are shaped and developed
primarily by the broad issues of class politics in the United States and much
less and certainly not decisively, by the imperatives of “anti-Castro” exile
politics. This is all the more true as so many Cuban-Americans visit the island
and become familiar with the economic and political discussions and debates
dominating Cuban society today.

The
ultra-right grip of the ex-Cuban bourgeoisie and the violent terrorists trained
by the CIA on Cuban-American political viewpoints regarding US-Cuba relations
is unravelling. Ever-growing numbers, at or near majority levels, of
Cuban-Americans favour normal relations with Cuba and an end to economic and
travel sanctions. It is precisely the growing pressure from Cuban-Americans
that led the Obama administration to lift the travel restrictions on that (and
only that) section of the US population.

It is
of great political significance that Washington finds it more difficult to
credibly hide behind the Cuban-American community to justify or rationalise its
anti-Cuba policy. The “Miami Lobby” has always been the directed not the
directors, the puppets not the puppeteers. Hopefully the purveyors of the false
“Miami Lobby” line will catch up with political reality.

[Ike Nahem is a longtime anti-war, labour and
socialist activist living in New York City. He is the coordinator of Cuba
Solidarity New York (cubasolidarityny@mindspring.com) and a founder of the New York-New Jersey July 26 Coalition (www.july26coalition.org). Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. These
are his personal political opinions.]

Comments

In Miami, one rarely sees among the media elite or the political class as many Puertoricans or Haitians as one sees 1st and 2nd generation Cubans who fled the island. Thus there IS a disproportionate influence of the more conservative and even reactionary elements in the vocal and regularly seen/heard descriptions of "hat Cubans want."

Otherwise, yes, the situation in Miami is more complicated than the one when I lived there, however, the point of the author in this instance is flat out incorrect.

In addition, the powerful role fear plays, literal fear of getting beaten up, of losing one´s job, of being socially ostracized in one´s neighborhood, or the same fear for one´s kids, or of even violence to the point of murder, remains in heavily armed and coke-addled Miami. I spent years there and know firsthand this fear and it is why I will not return there for any legth of time and when I do, I keep my mouth shut.